If TLOU isn't an achievement of storytelling in video games - by MOST people's standards - then what is?

Half-Life, Portal, Bastion, Dark Souls, Silent Hill 2 and Spec Ops: The Line all come to mind.

The first four virtually never interrupt gameplay with cutscenes, always keeping the player inside the action and in control of themselves at all times and thus creating a sense of immersion that no game with cutscenes can ever approach. Silent Hill 2, Bastion and Dark Souls in particular heavily rely on contextual storytelling: giving you very little information at the beginning and leaving you to piece together what happened through your experience with the game.

For example, in Dark Souls, we are given a brief cinematic at the beginning showing us what the Gods of the world looked like and why they fell from grace, and then later on in the game, we encounter them in their new mutated forms, twisted by evil and corruption. So your level of involvement in the plot is pretty much up to you. And Spec Ops's dark storytelling and twisted mind games makes one question whether or not they as the player were the ones responsible for the horrifying twists of the narrative, and operates on a meta level, making you wonder whether or not it was you, Captain Walker or the Colonel who was responsible for everything that's happened, a lot like Silent Hill 2 and how James Sunderland's worst enemy can either be you, himself, or the town itself.

Achievement in games storytelling, in my mind, is using the medium to its fullest extent. Interrupting gameplay as little as possible, telling the story through experience or context, letting the player decide their own level of interest in the plot and forcing the player to question their own decisions and motivations are all more "immersive" than even the shiniest of graphics that Battlefield or The Order: 1886 throws at us.

saying Naughty Dog needs to revise its writing process more than Ubisoft

Not "more", just differently.

There's nothing innately bad with starting with a setting or a plot or a character. This is not just applicable to video games.

No, of course not. What I was arguing is that if one puts focus primarily on where the characters are rather than the characters themselves, that's a bad idea.